“I’ve already made my money back and more every single month.”

Tommy Allen took over District H Strength and Fitness in Houston, Texas in the middle of 2019. The gym, formerly named District H CrossFit, opened in 2012. When the original owners sold the gym, Tommy and his partners decided to change the name to District H Strength and Fitness to attract a wider audience. 

The gym offers CrossFit group classes, boot camp classes, personal training, corporate wellness, nutrition services, and mindset training. The original owners were already UpLaunch customers, but weren’t using the software to its fullest potential.

That changed when Tommy took over. 

“I basically went through all the client campaigns and looked at all the individual communications that were being sent out and just made sure that it looked and felt how I would speak to my clients,” Tommy said.

Then he customized the communication even more by including short videos from his coaches.  

“That’s who my clients see every day. You get more of a buy-in from the clientele if we’re talking about certain problems, like setting a foundation or nutrition,” Tommy said.

He said adding videos to the UpLaunch emails was easy. 

“Literally just go into that email, add a video element, upload a link from our YouTube page, done,” he said.  

Tommy also uses UpLaunch to set up biweekly video phone calls with clients during their first two months. 

“I’ve created three different types of journeys based on how people get into our gym and our system, so if you’re a personal training client that looks a lot different from a CrossFit client, that looks different from a bootcamp client,” he said. 

Tommy said UpLaunch is an important part of his client retention strategy. He uses the platform to schedule quarterly goal setting meetings and conduct surveys, making sure he’s always in contact with his members, helping them meet their goals and providing an exceptional experience when they’re in the gym. ‍

Converting Leads, Winning Back Former Members ‍

Tommy used to think if someone expressed interest in the gym but didn’t join right away, that meant they’d never become a member. 

Then he began using UpLaunch’s Active Lead campaign, which includes emails and text messages. 

He was amazed by the amount of responses District H Strength and Fitness gets from the automated texts.

“One of the first texts that goes out is ‘What’s your fitness goal? Fat loss or athletic performance?’ and we typically will get someone replying and saying, ‘Here’s my goal.’ It’s awesome,” Tommy said, “and that’s without even having to do anything.”‍

What Tommy didn’t fully understand is exactly how long it can take to convert a lead.

“Because of UpLaunch’s automated drip campaign ... without being incredibly proactive, just letting UpLaunch do its thing, we had a lead go through our system for over a month before he finally converted,” Tommy said. 

He saw the same effect with the former member campaign, which goes out to people who cancel their memberships. A member cancelled, but returned after getting regular emails from District H. 

“If I have to spend $300 or $299 for an UpLaunch subscription but it has automated email features, broadcast features, and I don’t have to pay a staff member hourly to do lead follow up, I’ve already made my money back and more every single month,” Tommy said. 

Tommy appreciates the amount of customization allowed in UpLaunch, because he has very specific ideas about how he wants to communicate with his members and leads. 

“You guys give us enough flexibility to build our business how we want and the fact that we have a lot of control over messaging even within the automated platform is very helpful,” he said.

Tommy said he likes that UpLaunch allows him to add a human element to automation. For example, he’ll create a task that prompts a coach to call a member or lead. 

“When you take into account the amount of hours that go into lead nurture and then the fact that we can do broadcast communication like you would through Constant Contact or Mail Chimp or whatever, but we don’t have to pay for that and it’s $299, I think it’s well worth its price,” Tommy said.